application framework

Good news for all developers! QT will be available under the LGPL starting with version 4.5. The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation. The LGPL places copyleft restrictions on the program itself but does not apply these restrictions to other software that merely links with the program. There are, however, certain other restrictions on this software. The LGPL is primarily used for software libraries, although it is also used by some stand-alone applications, most notably Mozilla and OpenOffice.org.

This option could increase Qt usage and adoption. You may see more cross platform commercial application on the Linux desktop. This is huge news for cross-platform developers.

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google and based on the WebKit layout engine and application framework. On January 08, 2009 Google introduced a new release channels system, and now there are three distinct release channels – Stable channel, Beta channel, and Developer preview channel.

Google has released Chrome 1.0 on Dec – 2008, and now the company is all set to release version 2.0 (pre – beta version) of its web browser. From the release notes:

New version of WebKit. WebKit is the open source code Google Chrome uses to render web pages (HTML and CSS). 1.0.154.36 used basically the same version of WebKit as Safari 3.1, but the WebKit team has made a lot of improvements since that was released. 156.1 uses WebKit version 528.8 or, more precisely, revision 39410 from the WebKit source tree. In addition to fixing bugs and enabling features like full-page zoom and autoscroll, the new version also enables some nifty CSS features.

New network code. Google Chrome now has its own implementation of the HTTP network protocol (we were using the WinHTTP library on Windows, but need common code for Mac and Linux). We fixed a few bugs in HTTP authentication and made Google Chrome more compatible with servers that reply with invalid HTTP responses. We need feedback on anything that’s currently broken, particularly with proxy servers, secure (https) sites, and sites that require log in.

Look like the Mac and Linux versions of Chrome are getting closer. Are you going to switch to Google Chrome under Linux?